And then there’s that net you just watched in action. The Surrey Space Centre team behind it calls it RemDEB (RemoveDEBRIS), and it’s co-funded by the European Commission.

Orbital debris impacts on a panel of the Hubble Space Telescope. Picture: NASA/JSC

The demonstration was set up to prove it works. You saw the main satellite platform deploying a CubeSat, then shooting a net to capture it. It took six years of mucking about in drop towers and thermal vacuum chambers to get it to this point.

During that time, Elon Musk, Boeing, OneWeb and Samsung alone threatened to add nearly 14,000 small satellites to LEO.

The next RemDEB experiment will aim to deploy a harpoon involved, and a dragsail to force it back into Earth’s atmosphere to burn up.

“While it might sound like a simple idea, the complexity of using a net in space to capture a piece of debris took many years of planning, engineering and coordination between the Surrey Space Centre, Airbus and our partners – but there is more work to be done.